How Much Do Fields in the Russian Shelf Cost amid the Crisis?

In view of the unprecedented drop in prices for hydrocarbon in 2014, there is a growing opinion that in the new conditions where it is troublesome to recover the prices to the previous level, it is better to freeze the existing industry-specific programs and put the development of offshore fields on the back burner. It is mainly connected with the fact that the standard economic appraisal methods based upon discounted cash flows yield negative results. And how unprejudiced are these methods? Can such analysis be applied to such long-term and complex projects at all? All required parameters for such calculations are nowhere to find since there are no similar analogues and technologies for many of them either in Russia or in the world. If we take the official calculations in pre-crises prices of 2013 as our basis, it is hard to envision that such gigantic reserves of oil and gas truly have a significant negative assessment of dozens and hundreds of billiards of Rubles. In this paper, alternative methods of economic evaluation and the results of their application to individual bjects on the shelf of the Russian Arctic and the Far East are discussed.